One of the biggest problems you run into at tradeshows is that you're often booked solid with meetings. At Computex the situation is exceptionally severe since you've got every single motherboard manufacturer in Taiwan and they've all got interesting things for you to see. A sacrifice you almost have to make if you want to cover everything is to give up any sort of healthy lunch at a regular time during the day.

The only exception to this rule is if you're fortunate enough to have a lunch appointment - a meeting that takes place over a good meal. At the time, I was on my way to one such appointment on the third day of Computex 2002, eagerly awaiting the relatively Westernized food that was sure to be served (Chinese food is great, but you can only take so much frog soup and fish balls before you begin to crave pizza).

Outside the restaurant stood a group of my colleagues and John and Fiona Gatt of VIA Technologies (you may have heard of the company, I believe they make chips or something). My colleagues had some good news and some bad news for me; the good news was that we were moments away from eating, the bad news was that John Gatt wanted to take me on a tour of VIA. Bad news to them, but an opportunity like this is one anybody would jump on; even if it meant going hungry for a few more hours.

Hungry and off to VIA's tower - luckily VIA was kind enough to feed us. Be warned if you ever get Taiwanese pizza (from Pizza Hut nonetheless) - seafood on your pizza is apparently not uncommon.

Lots of Security

Before I begin talking about VIA's Taiwan offices you must understand that a tech company located in Taiwan doesn't necessarily look the same as a tech company located in California. Beautiful landscapes, shiny new buildings and lots of flowers are not commonplace but it's what's inside VIA that is most interesting.

If you ever walk into one of Intel's buildings in Santa Clara or AMD's headquarters in Austin, at the bare minimum you have a security guard that makes you sign in. Strolling into VIA's building was as easily said as done; no sign-ins, no metal detectors, nothing.

A group of editors just strolled into VIA's offices. The person closest to the camera is Mike Magee of the Inquirer.

Immediately after entering VIA's Taipei offices we went to a large meeting room where we went over some of VIA's future product plans.

VIA's Bread and Butter

Despite acquisitions of audio and graphics companies as well as starting their own motherboard line, VIA is still primarily a chipset manufacturer. On the Computex 2002 show floor there were almost an equal number of VIA based products to Intel products; among the most popular were KT400 and K8HTA but those two chipsets are just a small portion of VIA's upcoming chipset plans.

On the first day of Computex we brought you pictures of Intel's Granite Bay chipset, a high-end desktop/workstation chipset for the Pentium 4 with dual channel DDR SDRAM. Provided that Granite Bay ships at the end of this year, VIA is expecting to have a lead of a couple of months with their P4X600 chipset - a dual channel DDR solution for the Pentium 4. The P4X600 has deviated from its original production schedule by approximately one month; while tapeout was originally scheduled to be in time for Computex, it ended up getting pushed back until July. In comparison, Granite Bay is currently running quite reliably right now. The difference between the two chipsets is that Intel has had a dual channel DDR memory controller ready and tested ever since their E7500 chipset, while P4X600 will be VIA's first attempt.

Despite the lagging schedule of P4X600, VIA still expects to beat Intel to market with the first dual channel DDR desktop Pentium 4 solution. The reason VIA is able to accomplish this is because Intel seems to be holding off on Granite Bay until they get an idea of what AMD will be doing later this fall. Most of the motherboard manufacturers we've talked to are saying that Intel is waiting on Hammer before deciding when to push Granite Bay. There's also the issue of validating the chipset with DDR333 SDRAM which will be supported on the upcoming 845GE and 845PE chipsets. VIA is shooting for a Q3-Q4 P4X600 launch.

Although P4X600 is on the way, you'll see the release of the P4X400 chipset fairly soon. The reason behind the P4X400 is mostly a marketing one as VIA wants to get away from naming chipsets based on FSB or memory bus speeds, they simply change too quickly. Instead you will see a chipset family name such as P4X400 with individual chipsets being named P4X415, P4X415G, etc… (very Intel-like). The P4X400 will be very close to the P4X333 in terms of design and performance; obviously support for DDR400 SDRAM will be included.

VIA was demonstrating DDR400 running on a P4X400 platform at their office (below). Getting P4X400 to run at DDR400 wasn't much of a challenge for VIA considering that they were running KT400 on the show floor with a 200MHz DDR memory clock. With DDR400 a single 64-bit memory channel can provide enough memory bandwidth for the 400MHz FSB Pentium 4 processors. In the event that DDR400 does not take off, VIA will be transitioning their Pentium 4 line to dual channel DDR (much like Intel).

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Next on the roadmap for VIA is P4X800 which will offer DDR-II support. Details are sketchy at best but VIA's memory roadmap is aligned with what we're seeing from other chipset manufacturers: DDR-II is set to take over from DDR in mid to late 2003 and on into 2004. It's much too early to talk about the adoption rate of DDR-II but we are seeing positive response to the technology and just like with the original DDR spec, the graphics card companies are already working very closely with the memory manufacturers so they can use the technology as soon as possible after ratification by JEDEC.

In terms of features supported by these chipsets, you'll run into things like AGP 8X, USB 2.0, Serial ATA and Wireless (eventually). Serial ATA support will be first introduced by VIA with a discrete controller later this year. Just like VIA's USB 2.0 strategy, after the controller is proven in its discreet form VIA will integrate the silicon with their South Bridge core.

By far the biggest limitation VIA faces with their Pentium 4 line of chipsets isn't their feature list or their roadmap, it's tier 1 motherboard support. Because of the pending legal action against VIA companies like ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI won't touch any of their Pentium 4 solutions. Without support from the larger motherboard manufacturers VIA's IA-32 market share is being eroded by SiS' Pentium 4 chipsets.

Bread & Butter with a Hammer

VIA's working Hammer demonstration at Computex gave their K8HTA platform a good deal of credibility as it is more than any of the competition could say for their chipsets (excluding AMD of course). The K8HTA that was running in VIA's suite had an unusual heatsink and fan on the AGP 8X bridge and ran fairly warm, however the board that was running at VIA's headquarters had no cooling on the AGP bridge at all.

VIA's Hammer Demo

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The K8HTA AGP controller running without a heatsink.

It turns out that the AGP bridge on the board at Computex was actually a FIBed chip and in order to ensure stability the engineers wanted to offer additional cooling for the chip. As you may remember from our Inside Intel article, a Focused Ion Beam (FIB) tool is used to correct problems with the logic or wiring of a circuit after the chip has already been manufactured without having to respin the silicon. With Computex being a very time critical show it isn't too surprising that VIA was running a FIBed part since it saves a considerable amount of time as you don't have to remanufacture the chip once you've fixed the problem, you can use it as is. Since VIA is fab-less we'd assume that TSMC did the FIBing of the chip for the demo K8HTA platform.

Obviously there were no performance measurements or anything else to be provided regarding Hammer but it's good to see that more boards are actually up and running with VIA's Hammer chipset.

VIA is taking an approach similar to NVIDIA's when dealing with integrated graphics and Hammer, they will be using the Hammer's integrated memory controller and working with AMD to employ whatever techniques necessary to reduce memory access latencies. VIA also told us that there are some improvements that AMD could make to the Hammer core that would improve UMA (unified memory architecture) performance. They weren't clear about whether the first release of Hammer will have these improvements or not. Since Hammer will be targeted at the high end market initially it may make sense for AMD to focus on those types of internal improvements when spinning off a lower end version of the core.

Q&A with WenChi

It is not normal in the least to be visiting a large company and have the CEO drop by just to say hi and answer any questions you may have. The Craig Barretts of the world are generally extremely busy and are thus mostly inaccessible by the majority of the population. Needless to say that it was a pleasant surprise when VIA's CEO unexpectedly dropped by our meeting and sat with us for a while to answer questions.

VIA's fearless leader - WenChi Chen

With Hammer being such a hot topic these days, I asked WenChi to list, in descending order, his picks for successful Hammer chipsets. Obviously he was confident that their K8HTA would be number one but other than AMD he said it was too early to tell as far as the other chipset manufacturers were concerned. We tend to agree since at this point only AMD and VIA have chipsets that have been demonstrated publicly.

In response to a growing threat from NVIDIA on the chipset side, WenChi made one of the most appropriate statements I'd heard in a while; WenChi responded with "Jen-Hsun has got to worry about K.Y. [ATI's CEO] more." ATI is getting much more competitive than they have with past products and with a strong hold on the mobile market, any gains in the desktop sector could worry NVIDIA.

Mike Magee of the Inquirer asked whether there were any plans for VIA to make a 64-bit processor of their own (obviously referring to licensing x86-64 from AMD). With a smile, WenChi responded "Yeah, why not."

With very close ties to the motherboard industry in Taiwan, WenChi echoed sentiments we've heard elsewhere about RDRAM as a viable PC memory technology. If anything, "Rambus was too early for its time" WenChi stated as he explained that the very competent technology does make much business sense at this point. VIA is still very much dedicated to the DDR roadmap with DDR333 going mainstream later this year and into 2003 and DDR-II hopefully taking over completely by 2004.

Although a number of graphics related announcements came out of the S3-VIA joint venture at Computex, none of them were particularly exciting. The graphics business is quite lucrative and it makes a lot of sense for a chipset manufacturer to dabble in it since the fastest growing sales are of chipsets with integrated graphics. VIA currently plans on becoming much more competitive in the graphics sector with the release of their forthcoming Columbia GPU, a DX9 part due out late this year. We've heard claims as wild as NV30-like performance out of Columbia when it ships but seeing that NV30 is little more than numbers on paper right now, it's quite simple to make such claims; when push comes to shove, it will be interesting to see whether Columbia ends up being the C3 of graphics chips or something that exceeds all expectations.

After our questions WenChi bid us farewell as he went back to work but his time spent would not go unappreciated. It's very rare that you see a CEO that's this in touch with the community that purchases their products and it's clear, now more than ever, that VIA is in good hands with WenChi.

Inside VIA's Testing Labs

While we didn't see any 10GHz ALUs running at room temperature (which in Tapei is quite high) at VIA, a tour of one of their testing labs was interesting nonetheless.

VIA's Testing Team: Hard at Work

The primary focus of this particular lab is BIOS testing and engineering. The lab was carpeted and most of the engineers weren't properly grounded; the whole operation was very much like the classic "parents garage" setup but with some very expensive oscilloscopes, voltage probes and logic analyzers. You had a group of engineers at their best but without the polished environment of a similar lab we saw at Intel in Hillsboro.

Motherboards line the shelves - the one on the far left is an old AT Socket-7 board.

VIA's Dual Xeon Chipset

We stumbled across a few points of interest during the tour, and VIA was more open to pictures than we've ever seen any company be when walking around their facilities. A dual processor Socket-603 motherboard for Intel's Xeon processors was conveniently laying on one of the tables; the unique part of this board was that it used VIA's P4X266 chipset, a desktop Pentium 4 solution. Apparently one of VIA's customers is currently using this solution but considering how irate Intel is over the manufacturing of VIA's chipset on the desktop side, it's understandable that the Xeon board doesn't get much public attention.

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A bin full of P4X266 North Bridges - need one?

We later ran into the same board but with the heat spreader on the North Bridge removed and the core exposed. We were told that this particular North Bridge was FIBed to correct some logic problem in its design; the chip hadn't apparently been reassembled after being brought back from the FIB tool (below).

Ever wonder what a North Bridge really looks like?

VIAgorously Testing Hammer

More than anything the engineers in this lab were working on VIA's K8HTA reference board. One engineer that was working on the board pulled out a large notebook as I walked by; the notebook was filled with AMD business cards as he flipped through to find the right contact to call in Taiwan about an issue he was running into.

Click to Enlarge - One of many K8HTA Reference Boards

A large heatsink on the K8HTA AGP controller

VIA's K8HTA Chipset

VIAgorously Testing Hammer (continued)

Other K8HTA boards were hooked up to tons of voltage probes and logic analyzers, obviously debugging the chipset in preparation for a on-time launch later this year.

Click to Enlarge - Probing the South Bridge

Click to Enlarge - Probing a K8HTA Reference Board

Click to Enlarge - Testing a K8HTA Reference Board

We caught one board running Hammer in DOS but nothing was sitting in Windows just yet.

Click to Enlarge - AMD's Hammer running DOS

VIA's Challenges

VIA's roadmap and future products have been openly discussed at Computex leaving us with the task of pointing out the challenges VIA must face going forward; after all, in order for a product to be successful you've got to consider every reason that it would fail. There are many more competitors in the chipset market today than VIA has been used to in the past couple years and getting into other markets like Audio and Communications have their own challenges as well, let's take a look at just some of the things VIA will face as a leader in the PC industry.

Branding is a major issue that VIA still faces; VIA is still branded as a second tier manufacturer when it comes to quality and reliability, most of which happens to do with issues that they've faced recently. The South Bridge problems contributed significantly to VIA's present day image as well as leftovers from the old Socket-7 days.

VIA's motherboard line also faces a branding problem; when you see an Intel motherboard you pretty much know that although it won't be an extremely feature rich solution, it will be solid as a rock. In order for VIA's motherboard line to be successful, the same image has to apply and it must be backed by similar stability. Intel is quite open with their validation practices and the tests they run on all of the hardware they ship out, VIA should do no less and ensure that their validation processes are not inferior in any way. To VIA's credit, their motherboard line does carry a much longer warranty than any other Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer (5 years vs. 1 year) which is an indication of build quality and confidence in the quality of their products.

Intel and SiS are also challenges that VIA must face going forward, mainly because of the legal issues surrounding their Pentium 4 chipset. Intel will do whatever it takes to ensure that the major motherboard manufacturers won't produce P4X based solutions, meanwhile allowing SiS to make significant gains in the Pentium 4 market. If you combine that with the lower cost of SiS chipsets because of the fact that SiS is the only chipset manufacturer (other than AMD and Intel) that has their own fab plant, VIA does have some issues to face here as well. As you may have heard elsewhere, ASUS will be introducing a new motherboard brand that will produce low cost motherboards to compete with ECS. Because of very aggressive pricing (made possible in part by their fab), most of those motherboards will feature SiS chipsets which will be a thorn in VIA's side due to the sheer amount of volume ASUS will be dealing with through their new brand.

Creative Labs will be the source of some headaches for VIA as the tough marketing of their Sound Blaster line will definitely hamper the success of VIA's Envy24HT solution. From a purely technical standpoint VIA's Envy24HT has potential (output quality should be good courtesy of its 24-bit 192KHz DACs) but the reason for Creative Labs success isn't technology, it's strong marketing.

Finally we have NVIDIA, but echoing WenChi's sentiments, you'll see much more competition with ATI than with VIA.

VIA's Future

We bring our look inside VIA to an end with some words about the future. VIA's future lies in much more than just chipsets which is exactly what they must do in order to grow. There are a number of areas that VIA will be expanding to in the future and their success in these ventures will determine their overall success as a company.

First and foremost is graphics; graphics development is extremely important to any chipset manufacturer because of the incredibly high OEM demand for shared memory architecture (SMA) solutions (aka chipsets with integrated video). VIA has milked the Savage 4 core for all of its worth (much like Intel did with the i740) and now it's time for them to either get with the times or watch their market share erode. Luckily it seems as if VIA is more than interested in keeping up with the times and their Columbia GPU, when launched, should give us an idea of their potency in the graphics business.

A big focus at Computex for VIA was their new Envy24HT audio chip; this brings us to the second focus of VIA's future which is audio and multimedia in general. Technologically, VIA has what it takes with the Envy line of processors and their partners to make their audio business quite successful. But as we all know, it takes much more than good technology to make a product successful. In the end, the determinant of VIA's success in audio will be marketing. If done right, VIA could be in the powerful position of now being able to sell both chipsets and audio solutions to motherboard manufacturers.

The final focus for VIA in the future will be communications technologies. We've seen a bit from them already with various networking controllers but going forward you can expect VIA to become much more heavily involved in communications devices. By the end of next year you can expect VIA to have successfully integrated wireless networking (ala Springdale) into their South Bridges and going forward we'd expect them to build their communications portfolio.

Of course you can't ignore VIA's two primary businesses at this point - CPUs and chipsets, both of which will continue to grow as VIA does.

We hope you enjoyed this look inside VIA and be sure to check out our first article in the Inside series - Inside Intel. Up next will be ATI from our visit to them a few weeks ago…